Month: November 2010

“Guilt is a cognitive or an emotional experience that occurs when a person realizes or believes—accurately or not—that… she has violated a moral standard, and bears significant responsibility for that violation.” ~ Good ol’ Wikipedia.

The only force strong enough to take me away from London is guilt. It is my ultimate weakness… it will lead me to contradict myself, to break promises to myself, to be inconsistent, and I will fail to reach many goals because of it. If I let guilt seed, take root and grow, it gets in the way. Like a brick wall, there’s no getting through it.

Never mind if I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, but I feel like I would have had a better chance of figuring that out if I stayed here. I feel robbed of an opportunity to achieve something… something different, something more suited to my uniqueness… even though it was my own undue guilt that did the robbing.

Sometimes I wish I could be selfish and care less… I can’t but it never stopped me from trying. Alas, guilt always kills me in the end.

As I look back on all that I’ve done to you
My biggest regret’s
The things that I never could do

The children are the future. As a young adult slowly shaking off the last vestiges of my childhood, this phrase came to mind. Yet, from where I’m sitting, behind my skinny caramel macchiato, switching between Facebook and WordPress, the future of our generation looks bleak.

We were the first to be brought up with the internet and mobile gadgets being a part of our every day life (and probably the last generation who will ever know what a tape and VHS looks like). But has it made us lazy? We’re so used to everything being instant: a few keystrokes on Google and all of our questions are answered, no need to waste time learning anything. No more than 90 seconds needs to be spared to get us served at our local McDonalds… even sex is instant, whether in the form of cheap, easily accessible porn or cheap, easily accessible girls (thanks to low standards and little self-worth). You can get ordained as minister online, cheapening one of the most profound spiritual experiences to something as easy as preparing a cup of ramen noodles: three minutes on high in the microwave and, ta-da!, instant faith! Everything, and I mean everything, is instant.

My thoughts were on Tyler Climenti recently, the Rutgers freshman who committed suicide after a gay sexual encounter of his was streamed on the internet, as his name is being lent to a new piece of legislation in New Jersey against bullying. I would never wish what happened to him on my worst enemy. Figuring out your sexuality is a daunting and potentially traumatizing experience in the privacy of your own bedroom let alone being broadcasted to complete strangers. But his response to the provocation worries me beyond words. A growing solution amongst youths that fits right in with our expectations of instant everything: suicide, the quickest way out of any problem. Is the increasing suicide rate amongst teens and young people a function of our instant lifestyle, or is the rate of mental illness amongst us increasing…? Either way, we as a generation are damned and doomed if this trend continues…

What has all of this gotten us? Our generation’s lifespan is the first expected to decrease in modern history. We’re going to die younger than our parents because we’re less active, more obese, more hostile and violent towards our peers… And we can only blame the preceding generation so much before our actions really and truly become wholly our own.

Have you noticed the most recent dialogues floating around about the future that our generation spearheads usually ends in a cataclysm of biblical – to be precise: apocalyptic – proportions: the extinction of the human species. Whether our globe is rendered inhabitable by climate change, nuclear annihilation or divine judgment seems irrelevant: the end of the Age of Man is within reach in the future that has been handed to our generation. And the vast majority of us are too overly connected, over caffeinated and overly concerned with carnal matters to even care!

I don’t know what we’re being tested on, but I get the sinking feeling that our generation has already failed.

My advice: let’s collectively get our acts together… use social networks as forces of change, instead of a means of entertainment. Let’s start caring about our environment and ask questions like: ‘Is that empty can really being recycled appropriately?’ and instead of expecting the answer to pop up on Google, move our asses to where we need to go and find out! And while we’re on the subject of moving, we need to move more! Get our blood pumping, drive less (gets us brownie points on the environment issue as well) so that we don’t die a rich, overindulgent death in a pool of our own belly fats. And let’s take the time to cook our food instead of relying on fast food. Nothing worth having is easy to obtain, that is a fundamental truth that we learned when our parents tried to instill us with values of hard work, earning and merit. So we need to start prioritzing and spending our time concerned about the things that really matter and stop relying on quick fixes, because a quick fix only lasts for so long…

This is what we need to do… If not, you better make peace with whatever god you believe in, because our doom is inevitable.

Every time an era in my life comes to a close, or I embark on something new, I always feel compelled to start writing, to chronicle the novel events as they unfold. So this is what this newest blog is for:

I’m done with grad school, and I am currently gallivanting about London and will continue to do so for the next two to three months until I return home to get a real job… Alas, the growing up and responsibilities that I came to London to escape have finally caught up with me! Blast!

New things always inspired me to start fresh in every aspect in my life. I start chanting morning affirmations to reassure myself that I indeed am a beautiful, confident, strong, independent woman (o_O)… I tell myself that I’m going to cultivate more patience and I’m going to try to be more spiritual. I say this often, despite regularly straying from the straight and narrow…

And I even joined a gym yesterday. Since I have not stepped foot in a gym in more than a year, it seemed appropriate that this newly found vigour for life be directed towards getting in shape. Indeed, I do have a bridesmaid’s dress to fit into by next August, and crash diets only ever led me to crash into the nearest fast-food restaurant to feed my starving ass after two weeks of false hope…

So I figured I’d do it right this time! Paid for my membership yesterday evening and intended to run the this afternoon after work. By 1:30 today, I had a bellyache and was gassy from eating nothing but vegetables for two days straight, exhausted for absolutely no reason and seriously considering walking down to the gym and asking for a refund just so I could take a nap this afternoon instead… Yes, folks, I’m a mess…

Anyway, all this planning to renew, improve and change myself forced me to contemplate identity. It’s a reoccurring theme in my writing, only I’m thinking about it a little differently than I ever had before because I’ve found the more I learn about myself, the less I can really figure me out. I used to be really good at breaking myself down, defending, and defining myself… now, my most common answer to ‘Who am I? What am I about?’ is ‘I don’t really know.’

I don’t know what I want to be. I don’t know where I’m going or even would like to go… And while I have all the potential makings for greatness (I’m far more humble than this line would have you believe), I fear that I will soon succumb to my greatest fear: mediocrity and settling for whatever comfortable situation comes along… If that ever happens, I’m giving you all permission to shoot me… I’m serious!

Now, embarking on another again and I’m trying to write it down to try to make sense of it… Truth be told, I don’t even know if what I write ever makes sense, but that never stopped me from sharing… And I assure you, there will be some intelligent opinion pieces on the world around us in my WordPress… I won’t be ranting about how confused I am all that time… I even tired of hearing myself sometimes…